The Emperor's New Clothes Are Awfully Revealing

Not since the days when I helped plan satirical plays for a gravel pit in West Athens, Maine have I laughed so hard. The simultaneous meltdown of Twitter's ability to verify its high profile users and the resulting outburst of creative fun have been a welcome relief from the relentless bad news of the day: bait-and-switch on a few crumbs of student loan forgiveness, simultaneous CIA regime change operations aimed at Russia, China, and Iran, and cold weather approaching while hundreds of thousands in the U.S. are without homes.

The closest thing the U.S. empire has to an emperor is the SpaceX CEO, a man who inexplicably bought a highly successful social media platform in order to .. run it into the ground? It's likely he thought it would bend to his will because, hey, he's a billionaire and that's how things work. But it turns out that's not how free or even partially free speech works. 

In a shocking revelation that legitimacy cannot be purchased (who would have guessed?) the sale of the blue check mark quickly turned into a free for all where, as one wag put it, kids spent their lunch money to impersonate Fortune 500 companies. And this tanked their stocks!

Another thrilling example of an evil, bloodsucking corporation lampooned financially with humor:

Verification on sale for $7.99 a month quickly led to a hall of mirrors as accounts scrambled to claim to be who they said they were (or weren't, as the case may be).

Needless to say, the emperor himself came in for a lot of impersonation as did his once valuable platform.

Social media is a newish phenomenon, unlike building cars or even rocket ships. But one of its most well-established tenets is: if you're getting a service for free, then YOU are the product. Because the owners of the platform can sell access to you to their advertisers. Charging you to be the product exhibits the confusion of those who think anything can be monetized to their advantage.

Did I mention that while taking an ax to the free-content-from-famous-people model that built Twitter, the new owner also decided to fire 50% of the workers? The speed with which this was done violated labor laws in several states. 

And the new normal at Twitter may entail generating income by selling users' personal data in ways that are prohibited by law. But not to worry -- the emperor's personal lawyers assured his remaining employees that they would be safe from legal repercussions if they followed his orders.  I doubt that many of Twitter's remaining workers were dumb enough to fall for that. 

It takes a special kind of wealth and worldly success to engender the hubris to make these kinds of blunders. 

Did I mention that the emperor also tweeted the day before the midterms to vote Republican? But, like many of his tweets as supreme leader of the bird, he took that one back down.

Pessimists are predicting that, without the terminated software engineers to keep the bird aloft, it will lose more feathers each day until it eventually sinks to Earth. Notwithstanding the fact that many who were fired were offered their jobs back almost immediately, you won't be surprised to hear that many considered themselves well out of the chaos and declined. (A slew of  top executives were either fired or resigned, too.)

Free speech used to mean oration and publishing in the press. Then social media came along offering a ton of freedom and reach until the tech bros got cozy with government and began restricting the flow of information quietly, behind the scenes. The emperor's need to brag went against this tacit agreement about how things are done. He was supposedly good at making money but his new attire reveals his butt hanging out there, slowly twisting in the wind.

I'm old enough to know that most things come to an end no matter how much you love them. The In Spite of Life Players retired from the gravel pit to be seen no more. I still miss them, and I will miss Twitter. 

But, it was fun while it lasted.

One last joke before we go: